Weekly Log 4 (Feb 21-27)

This week, we began testing our inverter and battery controller. Our wind turbine comes with an in-built rectifier that converts its AC output into DC. We have to use an inverter to convert this DC back into AC for our battery controller. Since the wind turbine wasn’t producing enough power, we decided to apply a non-conventional approach by using an industrial fan to power the blades of the wind turbine. Adopting this approach, we were able to get a maximum output voltage of about 10V.

We ran into some challenges when we tried to connect our PV panel to our battery controller. First and foremost was the fact the Statesboro had mostly cloudy weather. So in order not to waste our meeting time, we decided to simulate the PV output voltage using a DC power supply. Connecting this setup and hooking up our battery got the panel board of the battery controller to light up. However, our joy was short lived because we forgot to cover our positive and negative terminals going to the battery and there was a short circuit when both terminals came into contact with one another.

There was a huge spark and we ended up burning our battery cable. For the following week, we’ll try to get a new battery cable and proceed with testing our prototype to ensure it delivers the results we promised.